the only way to earn is to live

The Midnight Library 

Matt Haig

    "It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy. We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. "

    

    Yes, I do know that this quote is a bit too much, but i couldn't think of another better way to introduce this book. "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig is a fantasy novel. In this book we explore a place between life and death : a library with infinite possibilities of all the lives we could have lived or live or die in. The story follows around Nora Seed, an unsatisfied character, who commits suicide and reaches this fictional place. There she shuffles through various lives and while in this process she realises that she could have been a better person and that many of her decisions could have been wiser. She realises that each choice she had made had changed how her life would have turned out. It's quite an interesting book. I would recommend it to patient fantasy readers.

    Here are my favourite quotes:

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”

“We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don't have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”

“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”

Thank you!!